Biting the Bullet

I didn't watch Sex and the City until it had ended its six-season run. I didn't read Harry Potter until the last book was published. I didn't get a cell phone until my friends finally bought me one because they were sick of me being the only one they couldn’t reach (and worrying about me taking night classes at my university in Baltimore City). I didn't join Facebook until well after it was established as "the" social networking site (and I might add until I moved far away from my home town and needed to keep in touch more easily). The list goes on, and includes life decisions as well as technology ones. My point is: I don't tend to follow the hype. I like to make my own decisions on when to enter into the current craze--and I usually prefer to enter once it's no longer considered a craze.

This is how I find myself a 33-year-old former writing teacher -- with a current job where my main duty is writing -- who is just now entering the blogging world. My only foray into the genre was a blog I was required to keep for a class called Digital Writing in the Classroom. In the interest of full disclosure, that first paragraph up there was stolen from the first post I ever made to that blog.  All writers know you need to start with something, and most are taught to start with something already written, so there you have it.

Clearly, I like writing, given my current and former professions.  And clearly, if I gave in to the Facebook craze, I might as well give in to the blogging one.  It’s like my friend Sarah and I say: Sometimes things are a trend for a reason.  Things don’ t exactly become crazy popular because they suck, now do they? Let’s face it: Sex and the City was all that and a bag of potato chips – so much so that I’m right now watching a repeat episode on E! that I’ve likely seen 10 times (the one where she dates the ballplayer and runs into Big, for all my fellow fans out there).  And the Harry Potter books? Pure magic, no pun intended.

The bottom line is that, I process things by writing up reactions, summaries, and stories in my head.  I’ve essentially been keeping a brain blog for three years.  Why not put it on paper and torture others too? If nothing else, the people who know me and love me might get a chuckle and feel more connected even though we live far apart. And at the end of the day I will be writing. Not teaching writing; not writing to fulfill a requirement; not writing about a hydroelectric facility; not writing to jump on the bandwagon that I had convinced myself blogging had become. Writing because I love to do it. Writing because I need to do it. Writing because I have something to say that someone else--or no one else--wants to hear.

Because Stephen King's right: writing regularly is the point. Doing it for joy is the point. Someone else actually reading what we've written? Well, that's just icing on the cake.